Sparring for time, he said, keeping his tone and style carefully neutral, “You should come walking with me tomorrow. I saw marvelous things just a few blocks from here.”
“I’d love to, Thimiroi. I want you to show me everything you’ve discovered.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, Laliene.”
But as he said it, he felt a deep stab of confusion. Everything? There was the house where that music had been playing. The open window, the simple, haunting melody. And the woman’s face, then: the golden hair, the pale skin, the blue-green eyes. Thinking of her, thinking of the music she had played, Thimiroi found himself stirred by powerful and inexplicable forces that made him want to seize Laliene’s music sphere and hurl it, and with it the subtle melodikia that it was playing, into the street. How smug that music sounded to him now, how overcivilized, how empty! And Laliene herself, so perfect in her beauty, the crimson hair, the flawless features, the sleek slender body—she was like some finely crafted statue, some life-sized doll: there was no reality to her, no essence of humanity. That woman in the window had shown more vital force in just her quick little half-frown and half-smile than Laliene displayed in all her repertoire of artful movements and expressions.
He stared at her, astounded, shaken.
She seemed shaken too. “Are you all right, Thimiroi?” she whispered.
“A little—tired, perhaps,” he said huskily. “Stretched myself farther today than I really knew.”
Laliene nodded toward the cup. “The tea will heal you.”
“Yes. Yes.”
He sipped. There was a knocking at the door. Laliene smiled, excused herself, opened it.
Denvin was there, and others behind him.
“Lutheena—Hollia—Hara—come in, come in, come in all of you! Omerie, how good to see you—Kleph, Klia—dear Klia—come in, everyone! How wonderful, how wonderful! I have the tea all ready and waiting for you!”
The concert that night was an extraordinary experience. Every moment, every note, seemed freighted with unforgettable meaning. Perhaps it was the poignancy of knowing that the beautiful young violinist who played so brilliantly had only a few weeks left to live, and that this grand and sumptuous concert hall itself was soon to be a smoking ruin. Perhaps it was the tiny magical phrase he had heard while listening in the street, which had somehow sensitized him to the fine secret graces of this seemingly simple twentieth-century music. Perhaps it was only the euphoriac they had had in Laliene’s room before setting out. Whatever it was, it evoked a mood of unusual, even unique, attentiveness in Thimiroi, and as the minutes went by he knew that this evening at the concert hall would surely resonate joyously in his soul forever after.
That mood was jarred and shaken and irrevocably shattered at intermission, when he was compelled to stand with his stunningly dressed companions in the vestibule and listen to their brittle chirping chatter. How empty they all seemed, how foolish! Omerie stalking around in his most virile and commanding mode, like some sort of peacock, and imperious Lutheena matching him swagger for swagger, and Klia looking on complacently, and Kleph even more complacent, mysteriously lost in mists like some child who has found a packet of narcotic candies. And then of course there was the awesome Miss Hollia, who seemed older than the Pyramids, glowering at Omerie in unconcealed malevolence even while she complimented him on his mastery of twentieth-century costuming, and Hollia’s pretty little playmate Hara as usual saying scarcely anything, but lending his support to his owner by glaring at Omerie also—and Denvin, chiming in with his sardonic, too-too-special insights from time to time—
What a wearying crew, Thimiroi thought. These precious connoisseurs of history, these tireless voyagers of the eons. His head began to ache. He stepped away from them and began to walk back toward the auditorium. For the first time he noticed how the other members of the audience were staring at the little group. Wondering what country they came from, no doubt, and how rich they might be. Such perfection of dress, such precision of movement, such elegance of speech—foreign, obviously foreign, but mystifyingly so, for they seemed to belong to no recognizable nationality, and spoke with no recognizable accent. Thimiroi smiled wearily. “Do you want to know the truth about us?” he imagined himself crying. “We are visitors, yes. Tourists from a far country. But where we live is not only beyond your reach, it is beyond even your imaginations. What would you say, if I revealed to you that we are natives of the year—”
“Bored with the concert?” Laliene asked. She had come up quietly beside him, without his noticing it.
“Quite the contrary.”
“Bored with us, then.” It was not a question.
Thimiroi shrugged. “The intermission’s an unfortunate interruption. I wish the music hadn’t stopped.”
“The music always stops,” she said, and laughed her throatiest, smokiest laugh.
He studied her. She was still offering herself to him, with her eyes, her smile, her slightly sidewise stance. Thimiroi felt almost guilty for his willful failure to accept the gambit. Was he infuriating her? Was he wounding her?
But I do not want her, he told himself.
Once again, as in her room that afternoon while they were sipping euphoriac together, he was struck by the puzzling distaste and even anger that the perfection of her beauty aroused in him. Why this violent reaction? He had always lived in a world of perfect people. He had been accustomed all his life to Laliene’s sort of flawlessness. There was no need for anyone to have blemishes of face or form any more. One took that sort of thing for granted; everyone did. Why should it trouble him now? What strange restlessness was this century kindling in his soul?
Thimiroi saw the strain, the tension, the barely suppressed impatience in Laliene’s expression, and for a moment he was so abashed by the distress he knew he must be causing her that he came close to inviting her to join him in his suite after the concert. But he could not bring himself to do it. The moment passed; the tension slackened; Laliene made an elegant recovery, smiling and slipping her arm through his to lead him back to their seats, and he moved gratefully into a round of banter with her, and with Kleph, who drifted back up the aisle with them. But the magic and wonder of the concert were forever lost. In the second half he sat in a leaden slump, barely listening, unable to find the patterns that made the music comprehensible.
That night Thimiroi slept alone, and slept badly. After some hours of wakefulness he had to have recourse to one of his drugs. And even that brought him only partial solace, for with sleep came dark dreams of a singularly ominous and disruptive kind, full of hot furious blasts of anguish and panic, and he felt too drained of energy to get up again and rummage through his kit for the drug that banishes dreams. Morning was a long time in coming.
Over the next few days Thimiroi kept mostly to himself. He suspected that his fellow voyagers were talking about him—that they were worried about him—but he shied away from any sort of contact with them. The mere sight of them was something that caused him a perceptible pain, almost like the closing of a clamp about his heart. He longed to recapture that delicious openness to experience, that wonderful vulnerability, that he had felt when he had first arrived here, and he knew that so long as he was with any of them he would never be able to attain it.
By withdrawing from them in this morose way, he realized, he was missing some of the pleasures of the visit. The others were quite serious, as serious as such frivolous people ever could be, about the late twentieth century, and they spent each day moving busily about the city, taking advantage of its wealth of cultural opportunities—many of them obscure even to the natives of the era themselves. Kleph, whose specialty was Golconda studies, put together a small festival of the films of that great actor, and for two days they all, even Hollia, scurried around town seeing him at work in actual original prints. Omerie discovered, and proudly displayed, a first edition of Martin Drexel’s Lyrical Journeys. “It cost me next to nothing,” Omerie declared in vast satisfaction. “These people don�
�t have the slightest idea of what Drexel achieved.” A day or two later, Klia organized a river trip to the birthplace of David Courtney, a short way north of the city. Courtney would not be born, of course, for another seventy years, but his birthplace already existed, and who could resist making the pilgrimage? Thimiroi resisted. “Come with us,” Laliene pleaded, with a curious urgency in her voice that he had never heard in it before. “This is one trip you really must not miss.” He told her, calmly at first and then more forcefully, as she continued to press the point, that he had no desire to go. She looked at him in a stricken way, as though he had slapped her; but at that point she yielded. The others went on the river journey and he stayed behind, drifting through the streets of the downtown section without purpose, without goal.
Troubled as he was, he found excitement nevertheless in the things he saw on his solitary walks. The vigor and intensity of this era struck resonances in his own unfashionably robust spirit. The noise here, the smells, the colors, the expansive, confident air of the people, who obviously knew that they were living at one of history’s great peak periods—everything startled and stimulated him in a way that Roman Capri and Chaucerian Canterbury had not been able to do.
Those older places and times had been too remote in spirit and essence from his native epoch to be truly comprehensible: they were interesting the way a visit to an alien planet can be interesting, but they had not moved him as this era moved him. Possibly the knowledge of impending doom that he had here had something to do with that. But there was something else. Thimiroi sensed, as he had not in any way sensed during the earlier stops, that he might actually be able to live in this era, and feel at home in it, and be happy here. For much of his life he had felt somehow out of place in his own world, unable all too often to come to terms with the seamlessness of everything, the impeccability of that immaculate era. Now he thought he understood why. As he wandered the streets of this booming, brawling, far-from-perfect city—taking joy in its curious mixture of earthy marvelous accomplishment and mysterious indifference to its own shortcomings, and finding himself curiously at ease in it—he began to perceive himself as a man of the late twentieth century who by some bewildering prank of the gods had been born long after his own proper time. And with that perception came a kind of calmness in the face of the storm that was to come.
Toward the end of the first week—it was the day when the others made their pilgrimage up the river to David Courtney’s birthplace—Thimiroi encountered the golden-haired woman who had been playing the piano in the house down the block from the hotel. He caught sight of her downtown while he was crossing a plaza paved with pink cobblestones, which linked twin black towers of almost unthinkable height and mass near the river embankment.
Though he had only seen her for a moment, that one other time, and that time only her face and throat at the window, he had no doubt that it was she. Her blue-green eyes and long straight shining hair were unmistakable. She was fairly tall and very slender, with a tall woman’s quick way of walking, ankles close together, shoulders slightly hunched forward. Thimiroi supposed that she was about thirty, or perhaps forty at most. She was young, at any rate, but not very young. He had no clear idea of how quickly people aged in this era. The first mild signs of aging seemed visible on her. In his own time that would mean nothing—there, a woman who looked like this might be anywhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty—but he knew that here they had no significant way of reversing the effects of time, and what she showed was almost certainly an indication that she had left her girlhood behind by some years but had not yet gone very far into the middle of the journey.
“Pardon me,” he said, a little to his own surprise, as she came toward him.
She peered blankly at him. “Yes?”
Thimiroi offered her a disarming smile. “I’m a visitor here. Staying at the Montgomery House.”
The mention of the famous hotel—and, perhaps, his gentle manner and the quality of his clothing—seemed to ease whatever apprehensions she might be feeling. She paused, looking at him questioningly.
He said, “You live near there, don’t you? A few days ago, when I was out for a walk—it was my first day here—I heard you playing the piano. I’m sure it was you. I applauded when you stopped, and you looked out the window at me. I think you must have seen me. You frowned, and then you smiled.”
She frowned now, just a quick flicker of confusion; and then again she smiled.
“Just like that, yes,” Thimiroi said. “Do you mind if we talk? Are you in a hurry?”
“Not really,” she said, and he sensed something troubled behind the words.
“Is there some place near here where we could have a drink? Or lunch, perhaps?” That was what they called the meal they ate at this time of day, he was certain. Lunch. People of this era met often for lunch, as a social thing. He did not think it was too late in the day to be offering her lunch. And he was reasonably sure he knew how to go about paying for it. Kadro had given him a little plastic card that they used for money here, and told him how to present it when purchasing things.
“Well, there’s the River Cafe,” she said. “That’s just two or three blocks. I suppose we—” She broke off. “You know, I never ever do anything like this. Let myself get picked up in the street, I mean.”
“Picked up? I do not understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“The phrase,” Thimiroi said. “Pick up? To lift? Am I lifting you?”
She laughed and said, “Are you foreign?”
“Oh, yes. Very foreign.”
“I thought your way of speaking was a little strange. So precise—every syllable perfectly shaped. No one really speaks English that way. Except computers, of course. You aren’t a computer, are you?”
“Hardly.”
“Good. I would never allow myself to be picked up by a computer in First National Plaza. Or anyplace else, as a matter of fact. Are you still interested in going to the River Cafe?”
“Of course.”
She was playful now. “We can’t do this anonymously, though. It’s too sordid. My name’s Christine Rawlins.”
“And I am called Thimiroi.”
“Timmery?”
“Thimiroi,” he said.
“Thim-i-roi,” she repeated, imitating his precision. “A very unusual name, I’d say. I’ve never met anyone named Thimiroi before. What country are you from, may I ask?”
“You would not know it. A very small one, very far away.”
“Iran?”
“Farther away than that.”
“A lot of people who came here from Iran prefer not to admit that that’s where they’re from.”
“I am not from Iran, I assure you.”
“But you won’t tell me where?”
“You would not know it,” he said again.
Her eyes twinkled. “Oh, you are from Iran! You’re a spy, aren’t you? I see the whole thing: they’re getting ready to have a new revolution, there’s another Ayatollah on his way from his hiding place in Beirut, and you’re here to transfer Iranian assets out of this country before—” She broke off, looking sheepish. “I’m sorry. I’m just being weird. Have I offended you?”
“Not at all.”
“You don’t have to tell me where you’re from if you don’t want to.”
“I am from Stiinowain,” he said, astounded at his own daring in actually uttering the forbidden name.
She tried to repeat the name, but was unable to manage the soft glide of the first syllable.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it at all. But you’ll tell me all about it, won’t you?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
The River Cafe was a glossy bubble of pink marble and black glass cantilevered out over the embankment, with a semicircular open-air dining area, paved with shining flagstones, that jutted even farther, so that it seemed suspended almost in mid-river. They were lucky enough to find one vacant
table that was right at the cafe’s outermost edge, looking down on the swift blue river-flow. “Ordinarily the outdoor section doesn’t open until the middle of June,” Christine told him. “But this year it’s been so warm and dry that they opened it a month early. We’ve been breaking records every day. There’s never been a May like this, that’s what they’re all saying. Just one long run of fabulous weather day after day after day.”
“It’s been extraordinary, yes.”
“What is May like in Stiin—in your country?” she asked.
“Very much like this. As a matter of fact, it is rather like this all the year round.”
“Really? How wonderful that must be!”
It must have seemed like boasting to her. He regretted that. “No,” he said. “We take our mild climate for granted and the succession of beautiful days means nothing to us. It is better this way, sudden glory rising out of contrast, the darkness of winter giving way to the splendor of spring. The warm sunny days coming upon you like—like the coming of grace, shall I say?—like—” He smiled. “Like that heavenly little theme that came suddenly out of the music you were playing, transforming something simple and ordinary into something unforgettable. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think I do.”
He began to hum the melody. Her eyes sparkled, and she nodded and grinned warmly, and after a moment or two she started humming along with him. He felt a tightness at his throat, warmth along his back and shoulders, a throbbing in his chest. All the symptoms of a rush of strong emotion. Very strange to him, very primitive, very exciting, very pleasing.
People at other tables turned. They seemed to notice something also. Thimiroi saw them smiling at the two of them with that unmistakable proprietorial smile that strangers will offer to young lovers in the springtime. Christine must have seen those smiles too, for color came to her face, and for a moment she looked away from him as though embarrassed.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark Page 18